supermarkets. They have sensitive cameras hidden on the shelves that record excitations of the inner eye, motions of the eye far more subtle and telling than a simple blink, and it seems that women go completely crazy eyeballwise when they see certain colors, packages and designs. These are orgasms, basically, of the eye, the brain and the nervous system. How do we use this research? Simple. We correlate high discharge events with the particular items that caused them and then we design our products and packaging accordingly. Once we get the consumer by the eyeballs, we have complete mastery of the marketing process.'
Sandy came back in and began to mouth some sort of complicated message.
But if Charlie truly believed the baseball was authentic, would he leave it in plain sight, unguarded, where a cleaning woman might decide to take it home to her kid because she doesn't earn enough money to buy him a baseball, or a delivery boy from the coffee shop around the corner-he pictured a swarthy male drifting through the corridors on a slow afternoon, with creamless coffee and a toasted English in a white bag, looking for something to pinch.
'She wants to talk to us, Dwayne. Yes, my secretary. Did I ever tell you how she types? She likes to fold one leg up under her. Before she began sitting on her foot she did about twenty-five words a minute. Now she does two hundred.'
Charlie was fascinated by certain quirks and traits that Sandy brought to her job. She had that distinctive English quality of looking terrifically fresh and crisp even while conveying tawdry intimations of the state of her underwear and the fact that she bathes only under pressure from her roommates, Fiona and Georgina.
Charlie talked to Omaha and deciphered his secretary's mouthed message at the same time.
'She's telling us she needs to leave early, Dwayne. She's been leaving early quite often lately. And taking conspicuously long lunches. We know what that means, don't we? An affair with a married man.'
Sandy did a stand-up collapse, aghast at the man's cheek. His temerity, his effrontery, his American facking New York nerve. Charlie gave her his Richard Widmark grin. He had no reason to keep her around the rest of the afternoon but asked her to order him an orange juice before she left.
Charlie wanted to pitch the Minute Maid account. He thought about orange juice all the time. He looked at it, drank it, had fantasies about it. He knew how to advertise orange juice. Forget Florida. Forget the piddling vitamins. You have to go for appetite appeal, for the visual hit, because this is a beautiful and enticing beverage and women's eyeballs reach high levels of excitation when they see bright orange cans in the freezer, gleaming with rime ice. You have to show the pulp. You show the juice splashing in the glass. You show the froth on a perky housewife's upper lip, like the hint of a blowjob before breakfast. Of course there is no pulp in concentrate. And there is only a microtrace of pulp in container juice. But you can suggest, you can make inferences, you can promise the consumer the experience of cit-rusy bits of real pulp-a glass of juice, a goblet brimming with partic- ulate matter, like wondrous orange smog.
He wanted to pitch the Smirnoff account. There was an element of Russian chic in the culture these days. Yevtushenko in his black-market jeans. Those Russian hats that sprouted earlier this winter, still going strong in New York and Chicago. Astrakhans. You wake up one morning and every third man earning a salary in a certain range is wearing a lambskin Russian hat.
'Dwayne, she's gone, good buddy. We've lost her to some lech in the copy department. I'd bet anything on that. Sandy thinks writers are moody and glamorous because they're always in danger of getting canned.'
The moans of spewing buses rose into the settling dusk. The office lights were on now and all up and down the halls the girls tapped on the squarish keys of their IBM Selectrics. The graved ball kissed the ribbon, the ribbon kissed the paper, a superior grade of bond that was rag-weaved like the oxford shirts worn by the bosses of the typing girls. Every sixteen seconds one of them hit the wrong key and muttered a middling curse.
The married copywriters met their secretaries, or the secretaries of other writers, or the tall and lissome secretaries of account executives, white-shod and well-spoken, and went about the tender regimen of their lunchtime love-the nooner, it was called, or the matinee-meeting in the secretaries' snug apartments, striking in their dimensional similarity to the cubicles the writers worked in, only decorated more touchingly and vulnerably, with posters of Madrid on the off-white walls, or prints of Marino Marini horses or Bernard Buffet lobsters, or in the larger apartments of secretaries with roommates, which complicated the schedule and made the writers yearn for an intimate glimpse of one of the roommates, barefoot in a partially open robe, perhaps, coming from the shower after a late night with a failed date, the apartments situated nearly always in the sunless hindquarters of white- brick buildings in the East 80s, undoormanned, the small elevators inspected every two years by an individual called A. Bear, according to recent entries on the record of inspection that was fixed to the elevator walls.
And yes, it's true, Charlie has practiced this kind of erotic disport himself, off and on, with one or another single young woman working in the production department or somesuch level of the mothership, belowdecks and lonesome and not always, actually, very young. But did he enjoy these interludes or were they sad entertainments he inflicted on himself in the stark space of a convertible sofa turned open to span the room so that he had to walk upon the bedding to go and pee? He had lovely sex with his wife in an antique bed with carved oak posts, so what are you doing here, Charlie, balling this morose media clerk. It was an odd form of mortification for some pattern of behavior, or grain of being, too transparent for this adman to fathom.
'This is the challenge, Dwayne.
He said, 'Package goods and painkillers. These are the things that keep the country running.'
A swarthy male stood in the doorway.
'Jou order oranjuice?'
Charlie fished some money out of his pocket and paid the guy. He took an extra-strength antacid tablet out of the bottle in his desk and washed it down with the watery pulpless half-rancid juice, for whatever calmative effect it might have on his acidic backwash.
He told a dirty joke to Dwayne and sensed the fellow going pink out there on the prairie. There was nothing left to do but leave. Charlie walked through the semiswank lobby, done in Babylonian art deco, and nipped around the corner to his Swedish masseuse, who karate'd his aching lumbar for ten minutes. Then he wheeled into Brooks Brothers and picked up a couple of tennis shirts because what's more fun than an impulse buy? He double- timed it across Madison to the Men's Bar at the Biltmore, where he massively inhaled a Cutty on the rocks and was out the door in half a shake and skating across the vast main level of Grand Central, the Bobby Thomson baseball jammed into the pocket of his topcoat-a Burberry all-weather that he loved like a brother and that went especially well with the suit he was wearing, a slate gray whipcord made for Charlie by a guy who did lapels for organized crime-because he'd decided the ball was no longer safe in his office and he wanted his son to have it, for better or worse, love or money, real or fake, but please Chuckie do not abuse my trust, I could fall down dead passing the stuffed mushrooms at dinner and this is the one thing I want you to take and keep and care for, and he went striding through the gate just in time to make his train, which was the evolutionary climax of the whole human endeavor, and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams.
The last express to Westport.
3
There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor that can make its way across a country, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don't know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fit, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old
